A Michigan biologist wonders how the Carp River in his home state got its name, considering that the river was so named long before that particular fish was introduced. I turns out, just as in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, Europeans who migrated there applied their own European common names to similar-looking American flora and fauna, even when they weren’t taxonomically correct. For Michigan names before the arrival of Europeans, look to Indian Names in Michigan by Virgil Vogel (Bookshop|Amazon). This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “How Could They Name it the Carp River When There Were No Carp?”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, good afternoon. My name is John Bauman, and I’m from the Upper Peninsula, Michigan.
Great, a youper.
That’s right, that’s right.
Welcome to the show, John. What’s on your mind?
So I’m a biologist in the region, and I cross a lot of rivers as I drive all around Michigan.
And I notice there’s several rivers in Michigan and other Great Lakes states that are named the Carp River.
And I believe many of those rivers were named prior to carp being introduced into the Great Lakes region, perhaps in the late 1800s or so.
And so I just suspected that perhaps carp meant something else, maybe not specific to fish.
And I thought that might be something you could answer.
Yeah, so the dilemma is how were they called the carp river before there were carp in the United States?
That’s right.
I thought maybe there was a different meaning to the word carp.
Yeah.
It’s kind of like that.
Basically, what happened was the Europeans came here, saw some fish that looked like the carp that they knew back from the old world, and just called them carp.
Even though they weren’t actually carp.
So you probably know the Latin names better than I do.
So carp are of the family, what is it, Cypranidae?
Cypranidae, that’s right.
Cypranidae.
But there are other common names, and you can find these in the Dictionary of American Regional English.
Fish are sometimes called silver carp or white carp, but they’re not actually carp or cold water carp, humpback carp.
And these are not of that family at all.
And I actually have something from a book by Virgil Vogel called Indian Names in Michigan, where he specifically talks about the Carp River getting its name in Michigan.
And he mentions that it was named for the sucker, which is a type of fish.
Maybe you know something about that.
That’s right.
Yeah, there is a species of carp sucker, yeah.
Yeah, so he says the Indians had named it for the sucker, and he writes, but the whites translated the name as carp for fish introduced from Europe.
So it was an Ojibwe name originally.
So that river in particular was named for a type of fish, but it wasn’t the carp.
According to him.
That makes sense.
I had thought perhaps that the word carp meant to pluck, you know, as if you’re carping on somebody.
And so perhaps when folks relied more on subsistence fishing, it was kind of maybe beneficial to know where they could go and just carp a fish out of the river for dinner.
But it sounds like it has more to do with the species, the carp sucker.
Yeah.
And the Europeans did that everywhere they went.
For example, the European robin and the North American robin aren’t the same bird at all.
They just look vaguely alike.
And so they called the North American robin the robin just because it looked like the European robin.
And the possum and the opossum in the United States and Australia have the similar names just because they both have the pouches and they’re both similar.
But they’re not the same species at all.
They just looked kind of alike, so they took the same name.
And you’ll find that again and again and again.
The common names are borrowed over and over again to refer to very different species.
And this is, of course, as you know, why we have the Latin names, because the common names only get you so far before there’s tons of confusion.
Makes sense.
Yeah, same thing with plants and flowers, you know.
A single flower name can apply to a lot of different flowers as well.
I loved your question, by the way.
I think it’s a really interesting question.
I love that it gets us into the naming of all of the different places and animals in this country.
Just the heritage of this one river, there is some continuance there that we still name the Carp River after a fish, continuing what the Native Americans had done.
It’s not the same name.
It’s not the same fish.
But there’s a little bit of continuance there.
So the historical chain of providence is still present.
Agreed, yeah.
I guess in addition to carp, there are a number of sturgeon rivers throughout the Great Lakes region.
And some of those sturgeon rivers, sturgeon, as you know, are a protected species all around the Great Lakes.
And some of the rivers that are named Sturgeon River, there may not be a remnant population in existence there today, but there are sites for reintroduction or rehabilitation.
And so some of the names of those rivers give an idea of what might have been here historically and maybe provides us a goal where we want to get to in the future in terms of species rehabilitation.
John, thank you so much for your question.
As you’re driving around doing your work with biology and fish and so forth in Michigan and come up with other questions, by all means, give us another call, will you?
Will do. Thanks for talking with me today.
Sure. Take care. Bye-bye.
Bye, John.
Bye.
